With iOS update, Moves is now a paid app

Finland-based Protogeo released Moves 2.0, an iOS7-compatible update to its original all-day tracking iPhone app. While Moves has historically been a free app, the new version will be sold for an introductory rate of $1.99 and a full price, starting in December, of $2.99. Existing iOS app users who upgrade will not have to pay.

“We think that Moves 2.0 is a pretty significant update. The whole thing has now changed and become more clean and focused,” Moves CEO Sampo Karjalainen told MobiHealthNews. “Now that we have this new battery mode we think it’s remarkably better and the value that people get out of it is very similar to what the activity tracking gadgets have to offer. We think it’s still quite affordable compared to those $100 gadgets.”

The new app will make use of Apple’s new M7 motion co-processor, which will allow it to increase battery life by 40 percent on a typical use, according to the company. The improved battery life will be on all iPhones, not just the new iPhone 5s.

The app will also have a totally new design to match iOS7. Finally, the app will be available in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and French as well as English. Karjalainen said the iOS7 release was delayed because changes in how background apps operated made it surprisingly complicated to update Moves for the new operating system.

Charging for its app is a mark of confidence for Moves, and a bit of a surprise given that its original value proposition of low-power all day tracking has been somewhat commoditized with the M7 and Google’s new built-in step counter. But Karjalainen told MobiHealthNews in September — when the company launched its Android app — that he still saw Moves’ experience in the space and data algorithms as keeping them ahead of the competition.

“Tracking is first, but then the challenge is to really make sense of that data, and help [users] change their behavior, those are really important,” he said. “And that’s something we are working on with new features on top of that data. But the first step is to make activity tracking work really well. And we have the best technology at the moment.”

For the moment, the Android app will remain a free app since it’s “a little bit behind the iOS app in features,” according to Karjalainen. Whether the Android version will also transition to a paid app is still undecided, he said.